Name: Miss B.'s Sour Salad Dressing
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons peanut or almond butter; ⅔ cup water; ½ teaspoon salt; 2 tablespoons lemon juice

Why it works: Peanut and lemon work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 341 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Miss B.'s Sour Salad Dressing

Ingredients

2 tablespoons peanut or almond butter
⅔ cup water
½ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons lemon juice

Directions

Rub the peanut or almond butter smooth with water.
Boil the mixture for a moment over the fire.
Remove from heat and add salt and lemon juice.
Cool before using.
If too thick, thin with lemon juice or water.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Peanut + lemontop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together341 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Peanut or almond butter: Provides the base flavor and body of the dressing.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the nut richness.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.